In 1967, the American critic John Barth declared that literary realism was exhausted. Two years later in Pricksongs and Descants, Robert Coover dispensed with the pleasantries, tackled the traditional novel to the ground and gave it a sound thrashing.

This collection of hallucinatory tales, Coover's third book, has influenced several generations of experimental writers, from Angela Carter to Dave Eggers. The pieces combine fragments of biblical stories, fairytales and popular myths to create what you could call adult fables – there are certainly no child readers allowed.

The opening story weaves several fairy tales into a disturbing dream. Jack has become the giant, while Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother gives her a lurid account of marrying a stinking, depraved Beast who never became a prince. As the characters chant their confessions, a woodcutter's axe echoes ominously in the background. The piece is laced with menace, but curiosity draws you onwards. In "The Gingerbread House", Coover retells "Hansel and Gretel", but mines the tale for its sexual possibilities, which are laid alarmingly bare. These early stories set up the tropes that recur throughout the collection – youth, sex, violence, death, disappointment and adult bewilderment – and the symbols we come to know them by: beating hearts, closed doors, ladders, human shit and perfect beauty.

The highlight, "The Babysitter", is an exhilarating feat of narrative plate-spinning. The simple story of a teenage girl looking after three children is told so that many different outcomes develop at once. She has a normal evening. Or, the children strip her naked while her boyfriend and his friend peer through the window. Or, the husband comes home and gets into her bath. Or, she accidentally drowns the baby. Since this early collection, Coover has gone on to inhabit still more esoteric realms of fiction, but this book contains his essential philosophy: we can only grasp reality in fragments. To read these stories, you must suspend any belief that the world is orderly, and can be explained by linear stories. In Pricksongs and Descants, Coover smashes the world and hands us the broken pieces. Whether gleaming or encrusted with filth, he insists we accept them all.